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Asked by valek to Anna, Catriona, Daniel, Katherine, Michael on 14 Apr 2015.
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Catriona Morrison answered on 14 Apr 2015:
Hi Kim, good question. When we do research we try to sample healthy kids who we believe are not suffering from ill-health or learning difficulties. Of course we can’t always tell – and this is also true if we’re testing supposedly healthy adults.
If the subject of our research is health then we will also test children who are in hospital. So, for example, some of my research has involved children with head injuries, in order to see whether their cognitive development is along the same trajectory as other children.
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Katherine Weare answered on 14 Apr 2015:
I work in the context of schools. You just take great care to think of all the variables that count for whatever you are looking at and make sure you build them into your sample and ideally in the proportions in which they occur in the overall population.
Comments
valek commented on :
Thank you. I asked as I am currently doing controlled assessments with my students and was wondering about how you control the variables of your samples and how you involved students in schools.
Chris J commented on :
Dear Kim
In my own work we would have a quick look at national performance tables to make sure that we start off by approaching schools who (according to these tables) sit around the national average level in terms of pupils’ abilities (and I realise that these tables won’t be perfect, and are associated with other more political issues).
We might often give a short intelligence test to the children we work with to ensure that we’re working with a somewhat representative sample in terms of pupils’ general ability.
Iroise commented on :
Hi Kim,
it’s not always easy to get schools and pupils involved, we sometimes have to spend quite a lot of time contacting schools. So although in my research I try to recruit pupils in mainstream schools, which should be reasonably representative of the population, there are often bias because certain schools feel they have more time to help researchers, and when we obtain consent from parents, certain parents may be happier for their child to take part in research than others.
valek commented on :
Iroise,
this is what I was thinking might hamper your investigations!
Much though we would like to know what makes our brains work, we are often constrained by the curriculum and feel that engaging in research will prevent us covering the topics that must be met.
It would be interesting to know how much time each young person would need to spend in a couple of pieces of research.